November 04, 2011

For the Halloween issue of FacilitatorU newsletter, the writers asked veteran facilitators to share with them their greatest fears (and those typically encountered by their groups) along with proposed coping strategies.

September 06, 2011

CNN interview with Sunni Brown, speaker and co-author of "GameStorming: A Playbook for Rule-breakers, Innovators and Changemakers." She was recently named on Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business List and on the 10 Most Creative People on Twitter list. She spoke at the TED 2011 conference in Long Beach, California.

A List Apart : JANUARY 25, 2011

The teacher who chastised you for “mindless doodling” was wrong on both counts. Far from shutting down the mind, the act of doodling engages the brain in the kind of visual sense-making people have practiced for over 30,000 years. Doodling sharpens concentration, increases retention, and enhances access to the problem solving unconscious. It activates the portions of the visual cortex that allow us to see mental imagery and manipulate concepts, and unifies three major learning modalities—visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Doodle Revolution leader Sunni Brown introduces strategic doodling and presents the ABCs of our shared visual alphabet.

You don’t have to be a great singer to write a great song—just ask Bob Dylan. Likewise, you needn’t be a Leonardo to draw your way to more and better ideas. Sketching helps you generate concepts quickly, exploring alternatives rapidly and at no cost of resources. The looseness of a sketch removes inhibitions, granting clients and colleagues permission to consider and challenge the ideas it represents. Mike Rohde outlines the practice, surveys the tools, and shares ways to become confident with this method of brainstorming, regardless of your level of artistic ability.

January 06, 2011

I have always wanted to have my brain scanned while listening and scribing. One limitation is that I'd have to lay immobilized on my back in a giant beige magnet. On a vacation a few years ago, I described what I do for a living to family friend who is a neuropathologist.

When I asked him what happens in my brain while I listen and draw images to capture ideas on large surfaces, he replied: "Why, your whole brain is lit up like a Christmas tree!"

Charles Limb is a doctor and a musician who researches the way musical creativity works in the brain. He wondered how the brain works during musical improvisation -- so he put jazz musicians and rappers in an fMRI to find out. What he and his team found has deep implications for our understanding of creativity of all kinds.

November 11, 2010

Caricaturing Economists

I was at the Legg Mason Thought Leader Forum last week, talking about my research over recent years on prediction markets. It was good fun, but the real novelty was that as I was speaking — literally, in real time — there was a cartoonist next to the stage, cartooning my talk on a five-foot-wide poster. I’ve never seen this before, but it was a real hit.

As a speaker, it can be hard to organize your own thoughts even when you know what is coming next. And as an audience member, it can be harder still to sort out the key points a speaker makes from their conversational asides. But the artist — Christopher Fuller who works for Sente Corporation— was just amazing. He not only picked out the important analytic insights, but found an incredibly useful way to represent them, cartooning (or perhaps caricaturing) my message.

I think this is a great idea, and it will serve as a useful reminder to those who heard the talk. And if you weren’t there, hopefully this cartoon gives you some sense of what I had to say.

Now if only I could get my MBA students to do the same thing, they would all have a wonderfully entertaining set of notes to study in advance of their exams. I would love to see a study figuring out whether it helps them retain the material. I bet it would.